A Basket of Offerings: Propositional Tactics to Design with Emergence

As we continue to be confronted by multiple and overlapping systemic crises, it is imperative to respond to urgent needs while facilitating deeper healing and vision that supports future goals and possibilities. As such this project explores the role of design in facilitating this twofold imperative while focusing on design-as-inquiry work that is initiated to make sense of “wicked problems”. The underlying proposition of this project asserts that design-as-inquiry work can yield outcomes that are tethered to both immediate concerns and future possibilities when done in relational entanglement with emergent networks. Emergent networks are groups of collaborators that sit at the forefront of systemic challenges, continuously adapting to radical events by self-organizing into simple but multiple interactions of interdependence to navigate systemic barriers and dynamic conditions (Pendleton-Jullian et al., 2018). This project explores collaborations with three distinct emergent networks to unpack a set of propositional tactics to facilitate relational entanglement with emergent networks in design-as-inquiry processes. For the purpose of this project, relational entanglement is viewed as the convergence and blurring of contextual, value-based and practice-based boundaries between designers and emergent networks to manifest deeply entangled inquiry methodologies and outcomes. Such methodologies and outcomes reflect the perspectives and experiences of inquiry partners while implicating the designer in the process by fostering a sense of responsibility and commitment to ongoing relationships. Through project research, it was observed that inquiry methodologies that grew out of different relational collaborations, were further getting entangled in practice, cultivating a dynamic and generative evolution and unfolding of design approaches applied across different projects. I find that these entanglements of methodologies and approaches stemming from collaborations with emergent networks have further shaped my overall design practice to be more emergent. This includes being more contextual, limber and adaptive to respond to urgent concerns while effectively creating space to envision future possibilities through inquiry. Like a basket woven from multiple strands of material, this continually unfolding design practice emerges from and reflects the underlying entanglement that gives the practice- the basket- its form and carrying capacity. The practice then acts as an offering- a manifestation of multiple entanglements- that designers bring to design spaces. As such the underlying proposition of this project is to redirect design work towards developing relational entanglements with emergent networks to support emergent work and be guided by emergence to better contend with dynamic and unpredictable conditions and crises.